When people are feeling confident, they’re focused on the task at hand, not on themselves.

We also use “I” less in the weeks after a major cultural upheaval like the 9/11 attack for Americans.

As we age we tend to use more positive emotional words and refer to ourselves less.

The higher one’s social class the fewer emotional words one uses.

Style words, according to Pennebaker, include conjunctions, articles, pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs. Content words are nouns, regular verbs, and most adjectives and adverbs. The content words are what someone is saying and style words are how they are saying it.

Women use more negations, social words, pronouns, verbs, and references to psychological processes than men do. (Surprise.) Men tend to use more big words, numbers, articles and prepositions. Yet the way women speak means we are, “more self-aware and open to self-reflection” believes Pennebaker, which must make him very popular with many of us women.

One: Learn about your personality from the style words you use by taking Pennebaker’s online questionnaire. He will analyze the results for you for free if you’ll allow him to use the results in his research. Discover whether you are high or low in the classic “big five” dimensions of personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.